Perspectives

The publishing industry, and book publishing in particular, are always said to be on the brink of ruin. But the numbers don’t support this. Investors continue to research publishing companies and to buy the stocks of the commercial participants. This is because even in the adverse environments that so many publishers face, shrewd management conquers all. It would be a mistake to be overly optimistic about the business of publishing but predictions about its imminent demise are misplaced.

The worlds of research publishing and college textbooks have mostly been separate, but changes in the nature of the curriculum and the ways textbooks are being acquired could change that. Increasingly institutions are setting up “inclusive access” programs, where textbook purchases are mediated by the library, which negotiates on the part of students (the students still make the purchase). Large research publishers may see in this trend an opportunity to leverage their experience in library sales and enter the college textbook market, perhaps through a significant acquisition.

University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. In this transcript of Michael Clarke's talk at the 2016 AAUP Annual Meeting, he discusses what these strategies are and why university presses have struggled to adopt them.

Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity.

Since the late 1990s there have been two drivers of growth in STM and scholarly publishing: site licensing and global expansion. As successful as these activities have been, we appear to be nearing if not a peak, at least a plateau. So the question is, where is the growth going to come from?

Given the pace of technological change, new sources of professional information, the increasing competition for attention, shifting demographics, and an uncertain economy, an effective strategy is more important than ever. Not-for-profit organizations tend to focus less on these activities than those in the commercial sector but this "strategy gap" can be overcome.

For all the talk of disruption, scientific publishing in fact has not been disrupted. The reasons for this are rooted in the culture of scientific communication and the functions of scientific journals—functions that have developed over hundreds of years. Those predicting seismic changes to the business of journal publishing because of advances in communication technology have been consistently frustrated. The World Wide Web itself was designed explicitly to disrupt scientific publishing, and yet here we are.